The Group Project in High School

My father is in town and I was recalling some memories of high school. One thing that I really disliked about high school was the tendency for teachers to take the easy way out and assign group projects instead of individual projects. The teachers would justify this decision by glibly saying that group projects teach people to work in groups which we to learn in business. This is nonsense! Before I attack that claim though, I will point out the obvious: the real motive for group projects is that it cut down on the number of papers the teacher had to grade by a factor of 4 (typically there were 4 people in each group).

I should say that I did learn something from group projects, but the lessons were largely unintentional. I learned that in a group project, almost all of the work was done by the member of the group who desired the best grade. I was always the member of the group who desired the best grade so I ended up doing 90% of the work while the other members took a free ride. This does teach some lessons in game theory, but it also creates resentment.

I work in a company where we do group projects all the time. I have lead projects and I have worked on projects led by other people. The similarity between a group project at work and a group project in high schools is essentially nil. In a business setting, the project manager assigns specific tasks to each member of the group. If I charge hours to a project that I do not work on I could be in serious trouble (its against the law). If someone works for me and fails to deliver on an assigned task, he won’t work for me again. You can only do that so often before its time to find a new job. Unlike high school, there are serious consequences for free riding.

My father gave an interesting example from his college days. He went to college on either side of WWII and this example came from immediately after the war. He remembered that he was always in a group with this person named Watanabe. Watanabe never worked with the others. He was very studious, and got good grades, but he didn’t want to cooperate on group projects. He said that because of Watanabe’s bad reputation, he was one of the few students voted down when his name came up for admission into the engineering honor society at school. Years later, his resume circulated at the company where my father worked and he recommended that the firm not even interview Watanabe. So in Watanabe’s case, the consequences for free riding were greater than he thought.

Well there is an interesting postscript to the story of Watanabe. Watanabe was a Japanese-American who had been interred in a camp on the West Coast during WWII. Interring U.S. citizens was a terrible violation of human rights. The fear of the Japanese caused us to bend the rules. But it was purely racist: we did nothing against the German-Americans and the Italian-Americans.

I don’t doubt that Watanabe left the camp bitter. He probably had the attitude that he would look after himself first and foremost and he was not going to volunteer for anything. In many ways, this shows how ethnic minorities that feel aggrieved will be less cooperative, a point I was making in my post: What Can Finland Teach Us? This is another reason why we shouldn't look to the Finnish schools as an example to reform the U.S. public schools.